---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Cynthia Stephen <cynste...@gmail.com> Date: Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 5:18 PM Subject: mining in the time of booms To: Hartman de Souza <hartman.deso...@gmail.com>
Friends: I do not know how many of you think you are personally affected by the situation of mining in Goa. Mark my words, this fragile ball of rock on which we live and move and have our being cannot be dug into without the ground being cut under anyone's feet. I should know. I am daughter of a brilliant mining engineer. He started his career in the 50s in the Gold fields in Kolar, after doing a three-year diploma in Mining. By 1959, he was found medically unfit to work in the shafts, his lungs having been seriously affected by the dust. He moved to the mining area in Bellary and I grew up there. He spent two years in bed, and at the end of that, had passed some exams which made him a full-fleged Engineer. In the 70s, he began working in one of the large privately owned mines in the area. We lived on a hill 3000 feet above sea level, and drove daily down the hills, covered with teak and sandal, and resplendent with orchids. Leopards stalked the forests and we often heard of them grabbing dogs and goats reared by the handful of residents in the tiny village there. The streams ran clear when it rained. But it did not last long. Dad died at the age of 51 when I was 16. He had lived on the lobe of one lung for may years, as the rest of his lungs had been ravaged by silicosis. Back then, I was too young to know of Occupational diseases and any rights he - or we - had. I left the area in the 80s. But once, I went back. It had rained. The streams were a blood-red torrent, the hillsides bleeding as the grass and trees had been ripped up. I went through such trauma at the sight that I vowed never to return. And this was before the craze for ripping open the bowels, the womb itself, of Mother Earth And the hills, on whose benign slopes trees swayed and sighed and leopards and deer played hide and seek, were razed into bloody stumps. When fields where sunflowers grew were given over to the bull-dozers. And to poor landless workers - Dalits and tribals, mostly - were made jobless in droves while heavy earth movers replaced picks and shovels and human hands. I drove along the Highway towards Goa. The ghats were ground to dust and the ore-laden trucks groaned and crushed the road into non-existence. The roadside fields and villages were covered with red dust. For hundreds of kilometres. The brightest things one saw were the faces of dolled-up young girls who peeped out from roadside tea-shops and arrack-shops. Our bus stopped a long while at one watering hole, and when we set off again, seemed to veer from one end of the road to the other, as the sloshed driver tried to escape the headlights of oncoming traffic, and we seemed not to be on land but riding on a very rough sea. All this was the downside of the boom in mining. The other side is the well-known role that mine-owners played, and continue to play, in the State's politics. Bellary and Raichur, which contribute billions to the country and the state, have almost no drinking water, or roads. Child marriages, HIV, and devadasi systems persist, some of the highest levels in the country - and female educational levels are even less than in Sub-Saharan Africa. The disparities are stark and have never gone away, before and even now when the mining boom is on. Citizens of Goa, wake up before it is too late. Defend, with your lives if necessary, "your" land and water and hills. Because we are all part of this earth. or else these "industrialists" and entrepreneurs will dig us all into such a big hole that there will be no getting out alive. All of our lives are at stake. -- Cynthia Stephen Independent Writer and Researcher And may you be blessed with the foolishness to think that you can make a difference in the world, so that you will do things which others tell you cannot be done "Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily." Margaret Atwood : Canadian Literary Icon.
